


Five Prompts Inspired by Triangular Angst

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:24:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lifetime of regrets</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Prompts Inspired by Triangular Angst

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ez_as_pi](http://ez_as_pi.livejournal.com) for the beta.

**1\. moan**   
Kara can't help moaning when she has really good sex. The only way that she can even come close is if she has something she can bite down on. When she's had to be quiet she's usually either set her teeth in her partner's shoulder, or occasionally her own forearm when the former hasn't been practical.    
  
There are several occasions when it's not practical. For instance, when she's with someone that she's never discussed pain with. She doesn't mind a little bit of pain with her sex - and in some cases, even thinks it's necessary. But she knows and can respect - usually - that not everyone feels the same way.    
  
Other times, it just seems wrong to set her teeth into someone else. It's a primal thing, as well as the practical effects of keeping her quiet. She's marking her territory. Saying that this man belongs to her, in a way. She doesn't want to claim just anyone. At any given time, Zak carried a mark she'd made, both because the walls in the base barracks were terribly thin, and also because she liked seeing them there. He did too, and she usually had her own marks to show (or not) when she chose.   
  
She never marked Sam. At first, on Caprica, she didn't know him well enough to want to claim him like that. When she brought him back to Galactica, and later New Caprica, it never felt right to her, somehow. Her left arm had an almost permanent bruise from where she'd tried to silence herself. The walls of their tent were even thinner than the barracks.   
That, and she was never quite sure whose name it was she would moan.   
  
  
**2\. ring**   
  
Zak's ring is the only ring she'll ever wear. It's an unspoken but understood fact. Sam doesn't quite understand this, when he attempts to give her a ring to commemorate their marriage. When she refuses, he first assumes that it's because it's really a rather bad job. The only metal they have access to is scrap, and the person he found to melt the metal down and reform it into a band isn't the greatest jeweler in the universe - (isn't a jeweler at all, actually) - and his assumption of that offends her quite a bit.    
  
She realizes a few minutes after he's stormed out of the tent that she's never bothered to explain to him about Zak, and Lee, and the Adamas and herself. He's walking a minefield he doesn't even know exists. It's not fair, she knows that, and she briefly deliberates trying to explain it all to him - about her past and the ring she does wear as both a reminder and a punishment.   
  
But when he comes back later, she's slipped the simple silver band onto her chain with her dog tag and hidden them both out of sight and doesn't tell him anything at all. She says she's sorry, that it's not the quality of the gift, but that she hates wearing rings and tattoos would be more permanent anyway. What does he think about tattoos?   
  
  
**3\. massage**   
  
One of her biggest regrets about leaving Lee is that Sam gives a shitty massage. It sometimes strikes her as funny that she thinks of coming down to New Caprica as "leaving Lee" not "leaving Galactica" or "leaving the military". Even though Lee hasn't been on the Galactica for awhile now. She'll never admit it to anyone else (and certainly not to her husband) but what pushed her over the edge wasn't Sam wanting to go, or Baltar decommissioning the whole bloody lot of them. She could've fought the decommissioning. She really didn't give a good gods damn where Sam wanted to be. It wasn't even the Admiral encouraging her to go - though she's pretty sure that Sam had spoken to him and that rankles her just a bit.   
  
No, it was the fight she had with Lee. The one where he told her she'd always be a frak-up, that they didn't need her up there and there was no more room for heroics. That the war was over and she should just go settle down on the planet with her true love. Never mind the fact that he'd moved on himself and didn't need her for anything anymore. Never mind that what they'd just done should never have happened and it might have been the best thing if they'd just forgotten about it entirely. But he'd told her to leave, and the time when she'd have disobeyed a direct order from her CAG was past. He wasn't even her CAG anymore. So she left him. Left them all.   
  
And one of her biggest regrets is still the massages.   
  
  
**4\. threesome**   
It's always a threesome when Kara's with Sam. Or anyone, really. Whether he ever realizes it or not, there's a third person in the bed with them, between them, beside them, separating them like some kind of invisible wall he'll never quite be able to breach. Lee's always there in her mind. When she lets herself go, gives herself over to the sex so that she can come, it's Lee she's picturing moving above her or beneath her or inside of her, not Sam. She learned part of her lesson when she was with Baltar - she doesn't speak during sex anymore - but she wonders sometimes if that was really the lesson she was supposed to have learned. Shouldn't it have been that she can't have Lee, won't have Lee, could never have Lee and that by fantasizing any differently she's just setting herself up for a fall? But no, what she's learned is that she can't mention Lee, can't talk about Lee, can't call out his name and so it's really just better that she has sex silently.   
  
Sam just assumes she's not a screamer.   
  
If only he knew...   
  
  
**5\. Mark**   
Marks are important to Kara. It's why on a few occasions, she's gotten a tattoo. The sun on the back of her neck is the first one she got, when she graduated, got accepted to the academy, and moved out of her mother's house - for good. Her mom had always forced her to keep her hair long and her neck covered (usually because she had bruises on her back) and she cut her hair and got the tattoo as a mark of her new found freedom.   
  
She gets another tattoo later, after Zak dies - she changes the design she'd created when she'd first agreed to his proposal, but puts it in the same place, the small of her back.   
When they're on New Caprica, and metal is so scarce, she decides that designing wedding tattoos is a good and powerful idea. She likes the idea that she and her intended will be bound together with a tangible mark that's never going to go away.   
  
Later, she realizes that it's going to be a way that she can punish herself with thoughts and memories of what might have been. What should have been. What could have been. She chose wings, because when she started drawing (she realizes in retrospect) it wasn't Sam she was thinking of. Sam, who'd never really been off the ground (except in transports, and it's just not the same, and never will be), who's grounded in the now and the real and the calm. Wings are one of the worst symbols for him, she realizes as she looks them over, and it wasn't who she was thinking of when she drew them.   
  
She was thinking of someone she could fly with. Metaphorically, and literally. She was thinking that some of the most powerful experiences she'd ever had were when she and Apollo were wing to wing or nose to nose. She remembers Zak always saying that she flew like she frakked, and that he would almost want to be jealous when (one time) he watched her with Lee up in their Vipers, except that he knew he was the one she was coming home to. 


End file.
